The present study uses conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to examine a series of conversation analytic data sessions taking place at a Japanese university. The data sessions were self-organized research meetings at which a group of master's and doctoral students at the university came together to perform joint analysis of segments of interactional data being used in their respective research. The objective of the present study is to investigate the ways in which several of the core notions of the communities of practice (CoP) framework, that is, practice, community, shared repertoire, identity, and learning as a transformation of identity within a community of practice, interface with empirical descriptions of the interactional and discursive practices of the participants as they work to accomplish their activities in a mutually recognizable manner.In order to accomplish this objective, this study first provides a comprehensive description of the various activity phases accomplished and organized by the participants at their meetings, and the ways in which they treat the final activity of doing group data analysis as being their culminating and main practice. Second, the analyses show how the participants use certain terminology during their participation in doing data analysis, and how such terminology use is implicated in their co-constitution of their group as a community, and in working up and managing identities within that community. The participants' interactional management of identity across several series of interactional moments is also examined, and the ways in which shifts or changes in identity are made publicly visible and mutually recognizable in and through displays of changes in participatory behavior in using terminology during participation in doing data analysis are described.Through providing a detailed description of the actual interactional practices deployed by the participants during their participation in doing data analysis, the present study works to respecify, in interactional terms, the notions of practice, community, shared repertoire, identity, and learning as identity transformation. It is hoped that the present study can provide a model of engagement through respecification for subsequent conversation analytic research seeking to engage exogenous theoretical frameworks such as CoP.

Description:

Ph.D. University of Hawaii at Manoa 2011.Includes bibliographical references.